Midnight Cheese

Let’s say Comcast’s bandwidth cap is equivalent to the property owner of a mall charging you for an hour’s worth of shopping access. You could shop at any store you choose (net-neutrality) but once that time limit is up (250GB data cap), you’re going to have to pay extra for more access.

Are either one of them entitled to charge you that way? Sure. Does it seem right? Not so much. But why not?

The property owner doesn’t have to charge you access to the mall because they’re getting rent from the stores. Unfortunately, Comcast isn’t getting rent from websites. So it seems they should be able to charge users access to those sites however they please.

No one wants bandwidth caps, but there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason why Comcast can’t do it, or shouldn’t do it. Comcast owns the road and can certainly set up as many toll booths as they please.

And that saddens me.

The picture pretty much explains it all. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it happen, so I don’t know how close it was to burning the place down. I noticed my battery indicator said “Not Charging,” looked down and promptly unplugged the thing.

We’re putting on a photo contest at TapeOnline that I want to encourage everyone to enter! The photos with the most votes can win a Wii, among other prizes. Vote tallies are low at the moment, so now would be the time to enter!

Once every hour since March I’ve been saving a snapshot of the NOAA map that shows all the current weather alerts across the country. Last night I finally compiled all the images from March 4th through July 23rd, 2008. Each frame of video is one of these maps. At 12 frames per second we’re seeing 12 hours of alerts each second that ticks by.

Fronts and severe weather sliding across multiple states is obvious. I’m going to attempt to keep the script going for at least a year and recompile everything then. The YouTube version is shown above. A full-res version is also available. (175 MB 800×500). Enjoy!

I recently came across this old parody from the early 1980’s of the network news and the newsmakers of the day. I’m told this was originally put together by some folks at CNN when the network was first coming on the air. The video is set to Don Henley’s ‘Dirty Laundry.’